A Super Cute Easy Pattern!

Hey there! Happy May!

So, today I'm actually sort of busy, since I'm having an amazing tea party later with my friends! But I decided I would squeeze in a quick post. :) I'm having a tea party because I was in Texas for my birthday so my friends didn't get to celebrate it with me. It's going to be sooo much fun, we have lovely tea cups and mis-matched saucers and a cake that I am just DYING to eat. We will also have the very traditional cucumber sandwiches and scones. AND (yes, there is more) I get to wear my adorable new dress from Forever 21! It's fantastic. The weather has finally decided to be nice too, a sort of miracle considering how the weather has been the past few days, so we can all go ride our cruiser bikes outside. In our tea party dresses. Heck yeah.

So, in case you couldn't tell, I'm excited.

Well, as the title of this post suggests, I wanted to share with you a really easy knitted dishcloth pattern. It's not even a pattern, really, because it's so simple. It's a perfect project for a beginner knitter.

So, pretty much what you do is you buy some yarn (cotton dishcloth yarn), I suggest Sugar 'n' Cream or Peaches 'n' Cream yarn, you can find both at Wal-Mart or Joann's or Michaels. Using size 7 or 8 needles (depending on how you knit. Some people knit very tightly, some loosely), cast on 35 stitches. I've gotten this number from lots of trial and error, and have found that it's a good size when you are finished. Then work in garter stitch (knit every row) until it is the length you want it to be. Cast off. Weave in ends. You are done. Seriously, it's that easy. If you want a bit of a fancier one, you could make a whole one in seed stitch (on an odd number of stitches, knit, purl, knit, purl every row. Always start and end with a knit stitch.). Sometimes if you mess up on seed stitch you end up with ribbing, but that's not too bad of a thing to happen. :)

I have made lots of these, and I'm happy to say that by now I can knit them without looking, all because of muscle memory. It makes it a good project to do when you are watching a movie or something. Here are a couple of my favorite ones:

This one was kind of fun to make, I got to experiment with carrying the colors up the side of the dishcloth. I like how it turned out!

This is one I am making for my mom. It's seed stitch with a little section of stockinette stitch. It's very lovely yarn that my mom picked out. :)

I REALLY like this one. It's actually part of the "One project per week for one year" thing I did. We all know how THAT worked out. Anywho, it's a lovely rainbow of fantastical colors! I even like how the back of it turned out.

This is one I am working on right now, as with the black and white one, I am practicing carrying the extra colors up the side of the dishcloth. I can't wait to see how it turns out. :)

These dishcloths aren't knitted, but I just thought I'd show them to you. It's from a very easy pattern and I just love how many colors you can make it in! I might even do a tutorial someday about how to make them... :)

So, as you can see, it's very easy to end up with a bunch of these cute things, and they are, as the title says, super cute and easy. There are seriously hundreds of free dishcloth patterns out there, so go look!

I'll have a post up soon about my tea party!

Happy May and Happy Knitting!

Maddy

Fancy Dresses and Fancy Projects

Hey there!

Well, we are home! After two days of driving, we got home Thursday night. It was heavenly to sleep in my own bed! The next day, we unpacked our ridiculous amount of stuff that we brought back, and it was a LOT, since we went garage sale-ing a lot and we raided my Beebo's shed. :)

As I said in my last post, we did a LOT of projects! I thought I might share them with you:

This is the adorable quilt that Kyra, my Beebo, and I all made for my mom for her birthday! It was a bit late (her birthday is in February and we gave it to her late March), but it was lots of fun to make, and Kyra and I learned a bit about quilting. My mom quite likes it :)

Aaaand another quilt! It's a very big quilt so I couldn't take a very good picture of it. Long ago, my Mamaw (Great grandma) made two quilt tops and Beebo asked her if she could have them for Kyra and I, so while we were in Texas we put them all together! This green one is mine, and Kyra has a pink one with a different pattern on it. All we have to do to finish them is tie them! I will put up more pictures of both of them when I do that. :)

This is one of my projects that is going to take a loooooong time to finish, but not because I don't work on it! It will take a long time because I'm making a quilt that is going to end up as hundreds of little hexagons, all hand sewn together. I like having projects I can take places, so until this quilt gets too big to bring along, I figure it's a good thing to work on. :) I'll be sure to post pictures of my progess as it grows.

This bag I knitted at a class! Kyra and I took a fair-isle class at Stix (a yarn shop downtown Bozeman), and it was so fun! We learned lots and we each ended up with a lovely felted fair-isle bag. :) It is a very adaptable pattern, too, so I plan on making lots of these! By the way, if you want to learn to knit or crochet, Stix has fantastic classes. I have gone to quite a few of them, one of them was even to learn to knit socks, and it was a very easy and understandable pattern when you have someone teaching you. Their website is: Stixyarn.com.

Now, this little bag was really just an experiment. I was kind of bored and my Beebo had lots of charm packs so I chose some fabric and pulled together a quick little purse. :) Honestly, though, I'm not quite sure what to do with it (I am a girl of many, many bags) so if you happen to know someone who would want it, just comment and tell me, because if it makes someone else happy instead of just sitting in my closet, that would be fantastic!

Now, remember in my last post how I said I was going to go to a ball? Well, I did! I had the BEST time, and my friends all looked beautiful, and the dances were so fun! We got lots of pictures, too, so enjoy!

I just love this picture of Kenz and I!

AND I love this picture of Cam and I!

We all had a fantastic night, and by the time it was over, our feet hurt terribly, but we all had big smiles on our faces! It was so fun to see all the girls in their dresses and with their hair all fixed, and to see all the boys in suits! I had such a great time, and I definitely plan on going again. I loved my dress, I got a cute new pair of flats, and my hair was actually fixed! How strange, huh? Hehehe, I tend to just pull my hair up so that it's out of the way, so it's kind of a rare thing to see me with my hair fixed. :)

I hope everyone had as good of a weekend as me!

Happy Sewing and Dancing!

Maddy

A Blogging Break.... in Texas!

Hey there! It's me! No, I have not disappeared off the face of the planet. Sorry for the long break! Guess where I am? I'm in Texas! In fact, I have been for nearly two months! We all decided to take a break from the decidedly chilly weather in dear ol' Montana and come down to nice warm Texas and visit the family. We have done lots of fun stuff and have gotten nice and tan, and we are heading back home on Wednesday. Much as I love my family and Texas, it will be pretty nice to have my room and my friends back, not to mention my hair doesn't get NEARLY as frizzy at home as it does here. Darn humidity :). I'm afraid I don't have any pictures to post right now, but I promise to put some good ones up when we get home!

After we do get home, and after two days of driving, I'm not going to get too much rest, because next Saturday I get to do what is my idea of a super fun time.... I'm going to a ball! Not what you expected? Eh, that's okay. It's true though! I'm going with my amazing friends. It takes place at MSU. Kenzie got to go last year and had a blast, so she remembered to tell us about it this year. We all have lovely dresses to wear and I will most certainly write a post about it!

Also, I don't know if you have noticed, but I am reaaaaaaaally good at starting a project and not finishing it. Sorry I haven't done the 52 weeks of projects thing, it was a lot to do, and I really should have started out smaller, maybe with something every month instead of every week. I got to week six, I think. Hahaha! Oh well. There will always be more projects. In fact, I have done lots of projects while we have been in TX, so when I get home I will do a post about them. Honestly, it's a LOT of projects.

Oh yeah, I am now 14 years old! Yep! For my birthday (April 2nd) my mom, sister, Beebo, and I all went to see the movie Mirror Mirror, which was so funny and cute! I loved it! Then we came home and had a delicious dinner of chicken pot pie and a fantastic dessert of yellow cake with chocolate frosting and raspberry filling. It was as good as it sounds! I had a very good birthday :).

Well, there is a lot more to tell about our trip but I will leave that for another time in the near future. I hope everyone is doing well!

Happy Project Making!

Maddy

Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too....

Hello There!
I hope everyone had a good weekend. I had a rather lazy one, to tell the truth. I knitted a lot and watched lots of Psych... it was very nice. :) So, last week's project was to write a poem every day.... and.... I only wrote two. I KNOW I'M A TERRIBLE PERSON! But I'm also a terrible poet. You have no idea. So, instead of sharing my (terrible) poems with you, I will share with you one of my favorite Shel Silverstein poems. Drumroll please..............


(ahem)
Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too

Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too
Went for a ride in a flying shoe.
"Hooray!"
"What fun!"
"It's time we flew!"
Said Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too.

Ickle was captain, and Pickle was crew,
And Tickle served coffee and mulligan stew
As higher
And higher
And higher they flew,
Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too.

Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too,
Over the sun and beyond the blue.
"Hold on!"
"Stay in!"
"I hope we do!"
Cried Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too.

Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too
Never returned to the world they knew,
And nobody
Knows what's
Happened to
Dear Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too.

- Shel Silverstein

Isn't that a great poem? Sooooooo much better than I ever could have come up with. That is why I have no desire to be a poet when I grow up. Anyway, my poems aren't funny. So there you have it! A fantastical poem not written by me. :)

Now, my project this week is: knit a rainbow dishcloth (R, O, Y, G, B, P). I have knitted lots of dishcloths, but I've never done a rainbow one, and I look forward to it. I will definitely post pictures of it when it's finished!

Happy Poems!

Maddy


P.S.
If I were to do a tutorial on this blog, would you rather it be 1. How to make quick bread (a FANTASTIC recipe!) or, 2. How to crochet a flower dishcloth (like the one I made last week with my lighthouse one). Please comment and tell me, because I would love to do a tutorial :)

I ♥ Knitting, Friends, and Cooking

So, it's the end of the first week of my big project. Actually, it's Monday, so I'm a day late. :/ Sorry about that.... Sunday was a nice little lazy day. Anyway, last week's project was: Try a new knitting or crochet pattern. I tried two new dishcloth patterns, one knitted and one crocheted. Here is how they turned out!

This is the one I knitted. It has a lighthouse pattern on it and it turned out even better than I thought it would! I was very happy about that. :) I gave it to my mom, since she likes the knitted dishcloths better than the ones from the store.

This one I crocheted from a little pattern booklet that I got with some Sugar n' Cream yarn. It's such a cute pattern, and very easy. :)

Didn't they turn out well? I was quite happy.

Now, my project for this week is........ Write a poem every day for the week! Isn't that fun? I like poems. In fact, I wrote a poem quite a while ago that I will share with you:

If I could fill my house with books,
You'd never see the door.
And you wouldn't see the ceiling either,
Nor even see the floor.

How do you like it? Hehehe do you get the feeling that I sort of like books? ;) Anyway, at the end of the week I will share all of my poems with you.

Over the weekend I went to my wonderful friend Kenzie's house, where we played Super Monkey Ball, ping pong, took pictures, talked, and made dinner! Now, you may be thinking, "Is this the same friend she cooked with in the other blog post?", and the answer would be yes! Although, sadly, this time Cam wasn't there. Oh yeah, if you are confused by mentions of my friends, there are only two of them, so I'm sure you will get their names down. :) We made a yummy dinner of spaghetti, caesar salad, pork chops, and (or course!) homemade bread. I had a great time.

Before we cooked dinner, though, we went outside and had a little photoshoot. It was very fun! It was surprisingly nice outside, about 40 (okay, it was nice weather for MT), but by the time we were done, we could hardly feel our fingers. :) Here are a couple of my favorite pictures of Kenzie from our photoshoot...

There is another one that I really like, but it is sideways when I try to put it on Blogger.... Oh well. You can take my word for it. :)

Well, I had a wonderful time. I am blessed with the greatest friends! Maybe in my next post I will do a recipe or something.... that sounds yummy! If I did a dessert then I would even have an excuse to make one. ;) In the meantime.....

Happy January!

Maddy

Hello there!!!

I hope everyone has had a great holiday. We have done so much that I hope I remember everything! Well, I'll start with Christmas, I suppose. :) My friends and I like to see each other open our presents (from one another), so we got together at my house and had a tiny Christmas party. We had dinner, opened presents, danced, spilled water ALL over (on accident), and of course, played Monopoly until 1:30 in the morning. It was craaaaazy. But definitely worth it, because I have the best two friends ever :)

Of course, that party wasn't actually on Christmas. For Christmas we drove all the long way to Seattle to stay with my Uncle Tom! It was so fun, I really love Seattle. We walked a verrrrrry long way, but it's so worth it when you get a perfect cappuccino or a delicious pastry to walk around with. It was a very relaxed, quiet holiday, and I loved it. :) Kyra also had the opportunity to take some really cool pictures of some other place than Bozeman, and they turned out very well.

It was just a very great trip! :)

After we got back, I stayed home for just one day and then left to stay with my friend and her family at a house in the mountains for New Years. I had a wonderful time with my friend, and I even got to learn how to play a new board game! I really like to play board games :). But the best part of the trip by far, is the sledding! This isn't just normal sledding, where you go on a hill with a little, gentle slope. Ohhhh no. This sledding is (as Cam says) black diamond sledding. It is the best. We even have to hike to get to one of the hills, which is really tiring when you're hiking through the snow dragging a sled. All of the hills get (at one point) steep enough for you to have to drag your feet to gain some control of where you go. It's so fun! Truly, though, I can't describe it. The house we stayed at is near Big Sky, so we got to watch the amazing New Year's fireworks from the village. It was a great holiday!

Now, lots of other things have happened, and one of those things is very large. My brother got a call from my Uncle Mike, offering him a job and a place to live down in Texas. And Shelby accepted! I'm very excited for him, but I'm going to miss him sooooo much. He leaves in just a couple of weeks. I'm so lucky to have such a wonderful brother, and now he can go have a job he likes and he can go dirtbiking all year round!

Now, I have another little(ish) project. It's sort of my New Years resolution... Every week, for the year of 2012, I am going to choose a project off of a list that I made! 52 projects in all, and for the first week I chose this one: Try a new knitting or crochet pattern. I know, I know, not a very big project to start with, but I like trying new patterns. :) So every week I'm going to write in a little journal what my project is and how it turned out. I will be sure to take lots of pictures and to do a blog post every week!!! I'm very excited!!!!

I hope everyone had as good of a holiday as I did!

Happy 2012!

Maddy

Art Class at the Emerson

Every Wednesday I go to art class with my wonderful friend Cam. Sometimes we just do a little project for fun and sometimes we learn lots of things in one lesson. I love my teacher, Loretta Domasewski, and I definitely recommend her as a teacher. I have had lots of weeks of classes by now, and I thought I'd show you the art I have done so far.

This one is a winter-y one. We drew wreath things in oil pastel.

A bowl of fruit, done in charcoal.

Loretta taught us to draw spheres....

We did frog collages, we painted the background then drew the frog. Mine is slightly ironic because my frog is a tree frog and it's on the ground. :)

I have to say, this is one of my favorites so far. It's actually my latest one and I had fun doing it. :)

This one is also one of my favorites, done in watercolor pencils, which are one of my favorite mediums.

For those of you who have been to the Museum of the Rockies, you might recognize that this is Big Mike, the giant T-Rex statue outside of the museum. We went there to draw him and learn how to do figures.

This one we did for Mother's Day. Everyone's painting was different.

This one is a fun collage that we did in watercolor and oil pastels for Thanksgiving.

Once again, we went to the Museum of the Rockies when they had a frog exhibit there. We all spread out and drew frogs. The one I chose to draw was a tomato frog.

I drew both of these at one class. The second one was more of a practice to get used to the charcoals that we were using, and the top one I went outside to draw. Everyone in the class chose a different tree to draw.

This is from the class when we learned to draw wooden figures, and it turns out, they are one of my favorite things to draw! I love how many cool poses you can draw them in. :)

In this project we drew on plastic with sharpie over a picture, then we freehanded the same picture with white on black paper.

I always have lots of fun at class and I have such a good time doing what I love. :)

Happy December!

Maddy